Using the IBM Academic Cloud - Cognos Mobile

Recently I have been working on customising a Cognos Academic Cloud image for a university we are working with. I installed and configured Cognos Mobile, to get them the facility to view reports on iPads and iPhones - making Cognos a little trendier for the students!

Here is some information about the steps I went through to get this done.

My colleague created the cloud image for me, from a menu of different cloud image types that were available. In this case, the cloud image already has Cognos 10 BI server installed, on Linux.

First, to get the access I needed to configure and install software, I needed access to root. This is normally disabled, but can be re-enabled as follows:

root access

Log on using putty or equivalent as idcuser, passphrase whatever was set up when generating the RSA key.

idcuser has sudo access, however by default the root user is set
to /sbin/nologin in the /etc/passwd file, preventing root from having
a shell. To fix this, edit the /etc/passwd file using sudo

sudo vi /etc/passwd

and change the entry for root to /bin/bash

Save the file and then su to root with

sudo su -

Next I installed putty on the client I was using, and updated a magical setting in putty that avoids being timed out - the time out setting on the cloud images is annoyingly short - 10 minutes.

less
/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/AppSrv01/logs/server1/startServer.log

Install Cognos Mobile app

Using an iPad, go to the App Store and install IBM Cognos Mobile.
To log on, select the icon with the person and the key, to the right
of the IBM Cognos Mobile menu item. The first time this is
configured, you can type in the server address e.g.
http://170.225.96.249:80/ibm/cognos
(to change this later go to Settings – IBM Cognos).

To view reports, select Get more reports... and log on as
baadmin/password
when prompted. You can then navigate the same folder directory as
you see in Cognos Connections. After selecting a report, it is
downloaded and stored locally on the iPad, so it can be accessed
offline.